View from Bangladesh: With BJP’s West Bengal win, fears in Dhaka that ‘push-ins’ will intensify

The emphatic landslide victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party in West Bengal has thrust the issue of “push-backs” – or “push-ins,” as they are known in Dhaka – to the forefront of Bangladesh’s foreign policy concerns with India.

This border issue has rapidly emerged as the most volatile flashpoint in bilateral relations with India, carrying the potential to derail normalisation efforts and trigger a serious humanitarian and diplomatic crisis.

Since May 2025, Bangladeshi authorities have documented the forced entry of around 2,500 individuals into the country from India.

These operations reportedly involve detentions lasting weeks or even months, followed by expulsion across the border by Indian officials – often at night and away from regular Border Guard Bangladesh patrol points.

Among those pushed in have been several confirmed Indian nationals and Rohingya refugees who have fled persecution in Myanmar.

In April, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma openly defended the practice. “Rude people don’t understand soft language,” he said, describing how suspected individuals are detained for 20 to 40 days before being pushed across the border.

He claimed that strained relations with Bangladesh actually facilitate these operations. “I pray to god every morning that the situation that existed during Yunus’s time should remain the same; that relations should not improve further,” he said, because when the relationship between the neighbours is good, India usually halts such push-ins.

Assam has emerged as a testing ground for aggressive push-backs. The victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the West Bengal election has now heightened fears in Bangladesh that such actions could expand significantly.

The BJP campaign rhetoric, led by figures such as Suvendu Adhikari, focused heavily on the emotive issue of “Bangladeshi infiltrators” and “Muslim foreigners”. Some claimed that there were as many as 20 million undocumented Bangladeshis in India.

These narratives were reinforced by the controversial Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in West Bengal, which resulted in around 2.7 million names being deleted, a disproportionately high number of them Muslims. Some fear that they now face the prospect of being declared foreigners.

Given Sarma’s explicit acknowledgement of nighttime push-backs into Bangladesh, concerns are growing in Dhaka about the possibility of a coordinated multi-state operation involving Assam, the new West Bengal government, and even Tripura.

Such a synchronised drive could overwhelm Bangladesh’s border management capacity and trigger a major humanitarian crisis.

India has urged Bangladesh to hasten the process of verifying the nationality of people on a list it has submitted of alleged undocumented migrants. It says that a backlog of more than 2,862 verification cases are pending with Bangladesh, some unresolved for over five years.

However, this argument overlooks a crucial fact: informal, unilateral push-backs conducted without due process are neither legally defensible nor humane.

Bangladesh argues that such extrajudicial operations violate both its sovereignty and established international norms.

Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman stated firmly that Bangladesh would “take whatever measures are necessary” if push-ins escalate.

This position was reinforced by the summoning of India’s acting High Commissioner Pawan Badhe on April 30 – the first such diplomatic protest under the new Bangladesh National Party government led by Prime Minister Tarique Rahman.

Bangladesh’s State Minister Shama Obaed Islam echoed similar concerns, observing that issues such as push-backs persist “regardless of who is in power in India”.

On the ground, Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmed has instructed the Border Guard Bangladesh to maintain heightened vigilance. In the strategically important Benapole sector, spanning nearly 102 kilometres, additional personnel have been deployed at sensitive points.

Bangladesh has intensified patrols on the border as well as monitoring it.

For Bangladesh, India’s campaign of push-ins represents a direct challenge to its sovereignty and national dignity. A country born out of a brutal struggle against demographic and cultural domination in 1971 now finds itself confronting the phenomenon of people being forced into its borders in a manner that bypasses diplomatic protocols.

The humanitarian consequences – separated families, destroyed livelihoods, psychological trauma and deepening resentment — are profound.

Compounding the crisis is the growing insecurity faced by many Bengali-speaking Muslims in India. Increasingly subjected to demands to prove their citizenship amid detention drives and contentious electoral exclusions, many find themselves trapped between an increasingly majoritarian political climate in India and a Bangladesh unwilling to absorb the consequences of India’s domestic policies.

The timing could hardly be more delicate.

Although the Bangladesh National party’s victory in February was followed by a positive outreach from New Delhi, developments on the border now threaten to undermine the spirit of that engagement.

India’s current approach – marked by unilateral force and inflammatory rhetoric – is not conducive to long-term regional stability.

The BJP’s sweeping victory in West Bengal has effectively removed one of the last significant political constraints on India’s eastern border enforcement strategy. Assam provided the aggressive template with remarkable candour; West Bengal has now supplied the political momentum and administrative alignment to potentially expand it on a much larger scale.

This issue risks dominating – and destabilising – the relationship between India and Bangladesh.

Jannatul Naym Pieal is a Dhaka-based writer, researcher and journalist. He can be reached at jn.pieal@gmail.com